Five Things You Should Know About…
…creating a successful email newsletter:
1. Build readership with trust.
Particularly with a business to business newsletter, your readers need to know it is going to be worth their time to at least skim your newsletter. Deliver concrete, succint and very useful information in every email, training your readers that it will always be worth it to open this one.
Make it your goal to have them feel that if they delete your newsletter, they will miss some insight that could have made a significant impact on their success.
2. Keep it real.
It should be your voice – your company’s philosophy and repuation is behind it.
Every company, even the largest – has its own culture, style, flow, approach and sense of humour. Don’t bury it in a misguided need to be “professional”. Particularly in small business, often your personal approach is one of your differentiators. Let your company’s personality shine through.
3. Keep it simple.
An effective newsletter isn’t the definitive work on that particular subject. It’shouldn’t even be a even a case study. It is a few straightforward, memorable, usable tips examples or ideas, your readers can quickly absorb, and want to take action on. If you overload a reader with information (even if it’s the best), they may think they value your input but in the course of a busy day may either delete or “save it for later”. Often, later (with all the best intentions) never comes and all of the old, saved newsletters are flushed in an email purge.
If you want to round out the information tidbits offered in your newsletter, give the briefest summary of the information in your newsletter and then offer a link to a page on your website, your latest blog post perhaps, with more detail for those who are genuinely interested in learning more. This also serves one of the prime objectives of an email newsletter – driving traffic to your site so they may learn more about you and your company building a stronger relationship.
Deliver soundbytes = something informative, even enlightening but small enough to skim and remember.
4. Keep it Recognizable
A prospect sees your logo, email newsletter, website, ad, Twitter or Facebook page and has even a passing thought of “Ah, that company, I’m going to contact them today, I really think they may have just what I need”. Quite simply this is the objective of consistent branding.
Creating an simple, relevant, compelling brand for your business, and then reinforcing that brand in every form of communication will help potential customers recognize you quickly and differentiate you from the competition, being more likely to take action.
5. Keep Track
Review and learn from your email tracking results. Know who opened, which links users are clicking on most. Learning to use and inerpret email newsletter reports will exponentially increase the value of this versatile communication tool.
Email reporting provides valuable feedback that can be applied to future communications and can inform SEO, web content development and other marketing initiatives.
I hope you found this reliable, real, simple and interesting (and branded).
Make the most of your online investment – it can be your most powerful sales and commnication tool. Call Boost to begin to uncover your full online communication potential.